If we learn one lesson from The Wolfman, Universal's feverish new redo of its own horror classic, it's this: the transmogrification of human to furrball is never, ever pretty.

Knuckles warp. Feet burst out of shoes. Cheekbones and forehead bend and expand, making room for pot-scrubber bristles of hair. As a wise old Gypsy says, struck by the existential pickle twining man and beast, “Where does one begin and the other end?”

Indeed. The Wolfman never answers that thorny question, but its filmmakers — Jumanji director Joe Johnston and screenwriters Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self — do their part exploring the hell that is the human psyche. They also get a kick out of graphic dismemberments, impalements, decapitations, gutted faces, gored chest cavities and large, glistening coils of spilled viscera. Lots and lots of spilled viscera.

The plight of Lawrence Talbot, the bedeviled young lord of late-19th-century Blackmoor (a fittingly tortured Benicio del Toro), hasn't changed much since Lon Chaney donned the fangs in 1941's The Wolf Man, but the wholesale butchery of the tale has definitely kicked up a notch or two. No surprise there: Horror in the age of pixels generally veers toward overkill. More unusual is the film's vintage spirit and overheated style, captured best by Danny Elfman's super-romantic music and the Wolfman's mournful, howling glissando. The movie even sounds old.

Sheer gothic kitsch is the order of the day. There's no point in making, or watching, an oldfangled romantic horror film if you don't have the stomach for trembling hearts (del Toro's and Emily Blunt's), inquiring detectives (Hugo Weaving's) or quivering Freudian subtexts that would bring out the monster in any carnally inclined English nobleman. (The movie's one prominent shrink doesn't fare too well. Funny, that.)

Shelly Johnson's ashen cinematography gives every scene the look of midnight. Clouds rush past the full moon. Already-pale Victorians blanch with fear, loading their guns with silver bullets for the four-legged wolf-thing bounding the moors. Actors fulminate and masticate, spit, scowl and sob; what a gas it is to watch them overact with joy and conviction. Understatement be damned: they're in a gen-u-ine hairy-scary werewolf movie, not some Nair-chested Twilight boytown, and they are clearly loving every minute of it.

As for The Wolfman's many computerized stunts, most are half-baked and unconvincing. Perhaps they're intentionally bad — yet another nod to films of yore — but in this context, they barely matter. The stylish gloom and warped psychological drama give the tale its juice. Anyway, the movie's best special effect hands-down is Anthony Hopkins as Talbot the Elder, who flounces around in a tiger stole and utters his lines with such a delicious madman twinkle you might want to snack on him yourself (ahhh-ROOooh).

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Whether all of this qualifies as loving homage or grade-B camp — well, let's call it both. Like the line between man and beast, it's sometimes hard to spot the difference. Just ask the Gypsy.